Numbers get retired all the time. When an athlete does something exceptional their number gets hoisted on a banner, never to be used again. Take Jackie Roosevelt Robinson, for instance. Not only the first Black player in Major League Baseball, but a six-time all star in a ten-year career. Jackie was everywhere and did everything. He was so good that after 1997, no baseball player gets to wear 42. And not just Dodgers. It’s the only number to be taken out of circulation by the whole league.
Jackie Robinson was unprecedented. After 2020, no one should use that word any more, either. Unprecedented should be retired. No, it didn’t shatter the color barrier or bat .342, but it did so much work this year it deserves a break. Send it to a beach. Let it fish. A quick look at Google shows searches for the world increased ten-fold in March of this year. From COVID to the machinations of the Trump administration, the word got used like a lighter at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. Let’s put it out. I’m sick of it, myself. It has been nearly impossible to make it through a news cycle without hearing it over and over to the point of lost power. In 2020 unprecedented became the “new normal” (which is next on my list.)
Everything is, in a way, unprecedented. Nothing with a human hand in it happens exactly the same way twice. If you want me care about the abnormal – donning masks in public, a loser that refuses to concede, a parade with no spectators watching the bands go by – tell me why in more than one word. Especially when that word is really, really tired.
